Did we create a generation of prudes?

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I spent ten hours at the cinema the weekend before Halloween. 11pm to 8am – plus the clocks went back in the middle, which was very disorienting. My friend and I have an annual tradition of doing a horror movie marathon at Prince Charles Cinema in Leicester Square. Every October they hold a series of scary movie events to choose from, which are usually: classic horror, teen horror, and a mystery grab-bag where you don't know what you're in for until your arse is in the seat. We decided to go teen for 2024: The Craft, Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty and, finally, Jennifer’s Body. Some of them I’d seen fairly recently, others not since I was a teenager myself, but they made me think about “teen entertainment” and how it’s changed over the course of the 21st century.

Firstly, let’s get one thing straight. “Teen” is a broad and confusing term. Technically it encompasses ages 13 to 19, and there’s a big jump between each of those years in terms of what appeals to you, what’s made “for” you, and how it’s marketed at you. For the purposes of this newsletter I’m not going to split hairs over what’s appropriate for a 13-year-old, a 15-year-old, and a 19-year-old, because the point I want to make is that it doesn’t matter. The problem, right now, is that there is almost no entertainment serving teenagers at all.

To be a teenager is to be in a constant state of longing for adulthood. You become increasingly aware of the world and its infinite possibilities at the exact time you’re forced into a restrictive regiment of school timetables, house rules, and a social life dictated by dad taxis and dogshit public transport. You shove headphones in on the bus and picture yourself successfully flirting with the person you fancy, like the cool character that TV show you like. You stare out of the window in chemistry and wonder if you could ollie down those steps to the yard. You mentally narrow down what car you will buy first when you become a millionaire and Google “boobs”.

The cruel irony, of course, is that you want the freedom of adulthood to do teenage things like “stay up late” and “go over Mark’s house whenever I feel like,” which you either outgrow, take for granted, or don’t have time for when you actually become independent (which is to say, need to support yourself financially). You might get a few years of it in your late teens and early twenties, if you’re lucky, but everything after that is spent longing for the freedoms of childhood.

What I’m saying is that teenagers by nature are desperate to grow up, and their curiosity and inexperience drives them to consume things they will not fully understand. They covertly watch 18+ films, seek out porn, and read things that supposedly smart people read. That’s something the art and entertainment industries used to be aware of. Teen films for instance, in their late 90s / 2000s commercial heyday, were overwhelmingly rated 15+ or 18+. They were given higher certifications in part because they were predominantly horrors and sex comedies, because those are the mediums most suited to exploring the two modes of adolescence: terrified and horny. But they were also given higher certifications because teen films, at their best, depict young characters grappling with things beyond their years. Sex, death, love, divorce, war. In short, the loss of innocence. It’s why the most enduring coming-of-age films – The Virgin Suicides, Donnie Darko, Stand By Me, Kidulthood, Thirteen – are all rated R by the MPA.

There also used to be an awareness that things that appeal to teenagers should also appeal to adults and vice versa. The magnitude of teenage feeling is often best expressed through exceptionally dark storytelling, and the weight of adult concerns are often best expressed through abstract or “childlike” mediums like animation. That’s why you get a lot of double entendre in early Pixar films (who had to pay for the kids to see it at the cinema? Parents) and why the overall content of Cartoon Network was mental (who was making them? Twenty-somethings doinga lot of psychedelics). That awareness is now gone, and has been replaced with a lowering of maturity across the board.

We’re experiencing the reign of popular entertainment for babies. The MCU, Young Adult fiction, grown women becoming hysterical over Harry Potter, couples financially crippling themselves trying to regain exclusive club access at Disneyland, the fact that there are adult membership clubs at Disneyland resorts to begin with. These are the highest profile examples of a play-it-safe safe culture, which is the result of corporate HR-minded coddling as much as it is institutional financial ruin. If any of these forms of entertainment grapple with existential concerns, it is from a great distance.

Clearly, the infantilisation of culture is coming from the top down, which is why the tireless stream of trade studies claiming that Gen Z are resistant to mature content is so frustrating. Take this recent piece in Variety about how teens want to see “less sex” in films and TV shows. If you actually read past the headline, which social media is not designed to encourage, that claim is debunked in the first paragraph. The report, conducted by the University of California, Los Angeles’ Center for Scholars & Storytellers, is titled “Teens & Screens” despite being a survey of 1500 respondents aged 10 to 24. So presumably a fair chunk of respondents aren’t teenagers at all. It also doesn’t actually conclude that they don’t want “less” sex. It concludes that over half of them didn’t think sexual content was “needed” as a plot device, which is a very different prospect.

There was also a lot of fuss about this thread from the account of an alleged 17-year-old complaining about Sabrina Carpenter behaving “disgustingly sexually in front of children” (throwing it back on stage) and claiming to be “AFRAID” of her “when she’s performing.” Now, not to put my tin foil hat on, but I don’t think we should be taking tweets from anonymous fan accounts at face value. Certainly, they should not be drivers of legitimate discourse. Especially not during an election cycle that has a potential incoming Vice President, J.D. Vance, who is publicly tied to the Catholic integralist movement (which advocates the integration of religious authority and political power) and notorious for his anti-modern worldview. Given the context, there is a good chance that any faceless account claiming to be a teenage (heavily implied) girl with an inflammatory take about one of this year’s most viral pop stars isn’t acting in good faith. We’re long overdue a return to turn of the century forum mentality, where anonymity was seen as a deliberate enabler of deviant behaviour and there was an overall assumption that nobody is guaranteed to be who they say they are. Even if I’ve gone mental and “@Popmvsics” is real, it’s still a stretch to take that as evidence of generational puritanism and not the most common teenage ailment of all: attention seeking.

That Gen Z are sex-negative is a common narrative pushed by the media in general, but I just don’t think it’s true. Have you been on TikTok in the last two seconds? Read a Letterboxd review? Overheard a group of teenagers talking on the bus? Euphoria and Sex Education are two of the most popular youth programmes in recent memory, and they grapple almost exclusively with sex and relationships. They come at the subject from opposite vantage points, but their teenaged characters are much less awkward and confused than their real news headline counterparts, and they both hit notes that resonate with a generation racked with anxiety and saturated in porn.

As far as the availability of sexual content goes, the 2020s are the most explicit decade in living memory, and the vast majority of it is either coming from Gen Z or supposedly aimed at them (you could argue both Euphoria and Sex Education are millennial shows, tonally and in terms of viewership, but their target demos, as well as the core fanbases of their cast members, are definitively Gen Z). My point being: Gen Z, much like the rest of us, is exposed to sex constantly, and they engage with it constantly because social media has established itself as the primary portal for sexual expression. But the reality of sex – which is felt, rather than observed – has never been further from reach, and that's partly the fault of the culture industries for failing to represent all aspects of it honestly. If I would describe Gen Z’s relationship to sex in a word, then, it would be confused.

There’s something very alarming happening with regards to the radicalisation of young men and the right-wing views that come along with it, but this generation is not sex-negative. Their relationship to sex is more performative than experiential, but they’re not against it. You have to wonder, then, whether these narratives advocating for “less sex” are coming from teenagers themselves, or being pushed on their behalf. If the story is that Gen Z’s relationship to sex is either extremely moralist or extremely explicit, then the truth is likely to be somewhere in the middle. The extremes are there because the sexual content they're exposed to is extreme; bombarded by Trad Wives and fat naked OnlyFans arses beneath tweets about global affairs on social media, let down by culture industries that traffic in sex but offer almost no meaningful or realistic interrogation of it. It seems obvious to me that young people don't want less sexual content, they want better sexual content.

Elsewhere in the news this month, there was an article about how publishing has abandoned teenage boys and that’s why they don’t read as much. Now, I actually get the concern around this one and sympathise with it to a degree. Young men are underserved as far as narrative representation goes within Young Adult fiction. However, the idea that there are no books for teenage boys is just not true, is it? Obviously not everyone will have the same interest in books or the level of comprehension, and it’s true that teen and Young Adult fiction currently skews in favour of female readers, but there are literally millions of books. If there is a current downturn of YA with teenage boy protagonists, why not guide them towards another section? I suspect the real issue is one of access (in the UK nearly 800 libraries have closed since 2010) coupled with a lack of imagination from publishers, which are both worth talking about, but this particular framing stems from the trend of cultural dumbing down I’ve been talking about.

Here’s the thing: Young Adult fiction is not a demographic description. It’s a genre in and of itself. At recent count, a whopping 74% of YA readers are adults. Young Adult fiction is no more for teenagers than A Farewell To Arms is for your dad. The problem, then, isn’t as much with a lack of representation for teenage boys, but the oversaturation of a certain type of book in general, which comes back to the domination of cotton wool entertainment for MCU-pilled Hufflepuffs who attended multiple dates of The Eras tour. Don’t get me wrong, it’s fine for those things to exist. Perhaps even a bit of overcorrection was necessary after the high sex, high T bonanza of the 2000s, but it cannot be all we have to offer.

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